Ruin Your Health With The Stimulus

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The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” (445, 454, 479). Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors.
But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”
Keeping doctors informed of the newest medical findings is important, but enforcing uniformity goes too far.
New Penalties
Hospitals and doctors that are not “meaningful users” of the new system will face penalties. “Meaningful user” isn’t defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary, who will be empowered to impose “more stringent measures of meaningful use over time” (511, 518, 540-541)
What penalties will deter your doctor from going beyond the electronically delivered protocols when your condition is atypical or you need an experimental treatment? The vagueness is intentional. In his book, Daschle proposed an appointed body with vast powers to make the “tough” decisions elected politicians won’t make.
The stimulus bill does that, and calls it the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research (190-192). The goal, Daschle’s book explained, is to slow the development and use of new medications and technologies because they are driving up costs. He praises Europeans for being more willing to accept “hopeless diagnoses” and “forgo experimental treatments,” and he chastises Americans for expecting too much from the health-care system.
Elderly Hardest Hit
Daschle says health-care reform “will not be pain free.” Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them. That means the elderly will bear the brunt. Medicare now pays for treatments deemed safe and effective. The stimulus bill would change that and apply a cost- effectiveness standard set by the Federal Council (464).
The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K. board discussed in Daschle’s book. This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for younger patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly, such as osteoporosis.
In 2006, a U.K. health board decreed that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye. It took almost three years of public protests before the board reversed its decision....

Those folks may take some solace in something a senior administration official told the Treatment, the New Republic’s nifty health-care blog: Health care will be a “central focus” of Obama’s first budget proposal.
The specifics are far from clear, but the comment is a signal that the administration isn’t giving up on health reform. In anonymous interviews with the New Republic, administration officials have said that people shouldn’t doubt the president’s commitment to the cause.
“I’ve been in meetings with him and it’s clear this guy is committed to getting health care and getting coverage to everybody,” one high-ranking member of the administration told TNR’s Jonathan Cohn. “There’s no question in my mind.”
Presidential budget proposals actually don’t have a lot of legal significance, since Congress passes a budget without a presidential signature, the blog notes. But they have a lot of influence in terms of laying out the president’s priorities.

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Active Member

The Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Health Care (LCGHC) is the national alliance for single payer healthcare reform–publicly funded, privately delivered healthcare for all. We are a coalition of groups promoting comprehensive reform legislation to guarantee health care for all Americans as a basic human right. Despite spending twice as much as other industrialized nations, our mostly private health insurance system performs poorly. One third of every health care dollar spent pays for something other than healthcare–paperwork, profit and other administrative costs of private insurance that have little to do with addressing disease or injury. Poor health and poor healthcare hold down the U.S. economy and reduce productivity and further weaken the nation’s economy. A guaranteed health care program patterned after Medicare can provide coverage for all, while at the same time saving close to $300 billion per year.

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Well-Known Member

I'm not Pastor Mitchell, but I'll answer anyway. Certainly Daschle wasn't talking about wrinkles. I've never heard of a senior citizen looking for treatment from a doctor for wrinkles. He said, "Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them". Obviously some seniors deal with wrinkles by going to a plastic surgeon, but there's no way you can think that his what Daschle is talking about.

What conditions is he talking about? I have no idea, but to even suggest that any condition is one that seniors should just dismiss is just plain stupid. As I said, I don't know exactly what Daschle was referring to, but we can ascertain some things from the UK system that he praised and based his model after.

"In 2006, a U.K. health board decreed that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye. It took almost three years of public protests before the board reversed its decision."

That's the sort of thing I believe Daschle is referring to. That's the things that his idea of a "model" does.

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Active Member

A major flaw in the thinking of opponents of single payer health care is that they think that we have to accept all of the flaws in single payer health care systems in other countries, that we Americans can't build a better mousetrap. To such thinking I say, "Phooey".

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Well-Known Member

A major flaw in the thinking of opponents of single payer health care is that they think that we have to accept all of the flaws in single payer health care systems in other countries, that we Americans can't build a better mousetrap. To such thinking I say, "Phooey".

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When people such as Daschle promote the flaws in other health systems and make statements like ""Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them", then I have no faith that they are looking to build a better mousetrap.

If, Daschle was saying, "Hey the UK does some things right, but this whole business of theirs where they think seniors shouldn't get the same treatment as younger people is just stupid", then I might have some faith. But he (Daschle) wants to bring the flaws right on over.

Here's what they are proposing...you don't see this as a flaw??

"This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for younger patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly, such as osteoporosis."

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Well-Known Member

Then Daschle is as wrongheaded as the opponents of single payer health care are if he thinks we have to accept the flaws in other countries' health care plans. I say, "Phooey", to his statement, too.

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Good..I'm glad you can say that. Remember your "phooey" when you think about this stuff that Obama wants to do. Daschle was the guy he wanted to make all this happen. The only reason Daschle isn't involved (in an official capacity) is because of his tax fiasco.

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Banned

Fess up, all you who can change any issue into a screed on abortion, isn't supporting welfare babies more important than buying an extra couple of years for an 80 year old man? Isn't that your argument?

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Well-Known Member

Fess up, all you who can change any issue into a screed on abortion, isn't supporting welfare babies more important than buying an extra couple of years for an 80 year old man? Isn't that your argument?

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